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Multipurpose legumes

Project Details

Summary

Project Title:

Multipurpose Legumes and Management Strategies for Reinvigorating and Maintaining the Health and Productivity of Smallholder Mixed Farming Systems

Overview:

This is a participatory, systems-oriented and collaborative research project that aims at improving the livelihoods of smallholder farmers in western Kenya through integration of promising multipurpose grain legumes into the farming system. The project is led by the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization (KALRO) in collaboration with Cornell University (USA), University of Nairobi (Kenya), Egerton University (Kenya), Appropriate Rural Development Agriculture Program – ARDAP and Rural Energy and Food Security Organization - REFSO (NGOs), and AVENE Community Development Organization (a CBO). The project is working with groups of smallholder farmers in Nandi, Vihiga and Busia Counties in western Kenya to develop, refine and scale-out promising legume options for improving the productivity of the systems.

High population pressure on land has led to farm fragmentation in western Kenya, resulting in continuous cropping in an attempt to ensure household food security. This has resulted in soil fertility degradation and a decline in productivity. The western Kenya smallholder systems are extremely variable with respect to rainfall, temperature, soil fertility, prevalence of pests and diseases, land and labor scarcity, income, market and preferences. These factors must be taken into account in the formulation of appropriate production options. Therefore, options available for enhancing productivity must be applied in context. In other words, options must be matched to contexts. This requires comprehensive site characterization to establish the contexts in which to apply the options. In order to describe the contexts for the application of the various legume production enhancing options, a GIS-based site characterization is necessary.

Grain legumes have the potential to improve the productivity of smallholder systems. The project’s strategy involves the incorporation of multipurpose grain legumes into the system to rejuvenate the system health and improve productivity. Agro-Ecological Intensification (AEI) refers to improving the performance of Agriculture through integration of ecological principles into farming system management. The project has adopted the AEI approach and matching of options to contexts to facilitate the improvement of the ecosystem and realize multiple benefits of multipurpose grain legumes. Some of the key AEI principles being addressed by the project include environmental resilience, use of local resources, facilitation of production under resource limitation, use of local and global knowledge, and functional diversity.

Project Aims:

Introduction of a wide range of legume species and varieties is intended to:

Increased livestock productivity through provision of high fodder value legumes

Improved health and well-being of household members due to a better household food supply and nutritional security.

Approach:

Legumes have the capacity to supply nitrogen to the degraded smallholder soils through biological nitrogen fixation. Certain grain legumes, such as lablab, soybean, groundnut, etc., have the capacity to suppress striga weed thereby improving the yield of cereals. Supply of biologically fixed nitrogen and suppression of striga weed is expected to contribute to increase to environmental resilience. Smallholder farmers in Nandi produce under conditions of resource limitation. Inorganic fertilizers are expensive thus the farmers use small amounts that are insufficient to generate levels of productivity required to attain food security. Combination of organic and inorganic fertilizers is one of the options the project is promoting to enable farmers cope with resource limitation and take advantage of organic-inorganic synergy. Resource limitation can also be alleviated by use of locally available resources such as, cereal crop residues and legume biomass. The project is promoting the incorporation of legume biomass to improve soil fertility and improve productivity of cereals grown in rotation with legumes. The project is training farmers on the use of locally available materials (crop residues, legume biomass, animal dung, Tithonia diversifolia,etc) which can be used to prepare high quality compost manure. The compost manure can be fortified with rock phosphate to improve the phosphorus content.

Outputs and Outcomes:

The project is expected to contribute the following outputs and outcomes:

An understanding of the distribution patterns of legume production constraints and opportunities available for improving productivity

An understanding of the interrelationships between the physical and biological constraints to legume production and how they interact to influence system productivity

Promising legume species and varieties tolerant to pests and diseases of economic importance in western Kenya smallholder systems identified

The target smallholder production systems diversified and productivity improved

Improved ecosystem health and performance through enhanced soil fertility and striga control

Enhanced capacity of researchers and farmers to conduct system-based on-farm research through formal and informal training

Team

John Ojiem

Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI)

Dr. John Ojiem holds a PhD in Soil Science from Wageningen University and Research Centre, The Netherlands. He is currently the Centre Director of Kibos Research Centre, one of the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization’s centres situated in Kisumu, western Kenya. Dr. Ojiem is the Project’s Principal Investigator and leads an interdisciplinary team of researchers spearheading the integration of multipurpose grain legumes into western Kenya smallholder systems to reinvigorate the systems and improve system health and productivity. He has experience spanning many years working with smallholder farms, mainly on issues related to soil fertility improvement. His research has focused significantly on the contribution of legumes to the economic welfare of smallholder farmers through provision of food and fodder, increasing household income and improvements in soil fertility. Previously he was a member of the Kenya Legume Research Network and has coordinated several multi-institutional projects addressing soil improvement in Western Kenya. He has also been a principal collaborator in a number of cross-country projects implemented in association with CGIAR centres, particularly on improving integrated nutrient management practices in small-scale farms in Africa. Dr. Ojiem has authored and co-authored many scientific publications in refereed journals, including contribution to book chapters, as well as publications in conference proceedings.

Samuel Mwonga

Egerton University

Samuel Mwonga is an Associate Professor in Soil Fertility Management in the Department of Crops, Horticulture and Soils at Egerton University. He has a BSc (Agric) from McGill University (Canada), MSc in Soil Science from the University of Nairobi and a PhD from Cornell University (USA). He has a postgraduate Diploma in Agricultural Research and Development (ARD) form the International Centre for Development oriented Research in Agriculture, ICRA (Netherlands). His duties at the university include teaching, research, outreach and post-graduate student supervision in soil fertility and related fields.
Samuel has wide experience in inter-disciplinary research, training and in development of training programmes in Agricultural Research and Development. He was a longtime trainer with CMRT, a Egerton-KARI-CIMMYT project that offered crop research management to mid-level scientists from the region. His research and training interests focuses on soil fertility management in low input systems including nutrient fluxes/balance in smallholder systems. His responsibilities in the project include research and development of low cost technologies to address soil P and system health, and farmer training in technology use for increased productivity and profitability. He is involved in providing guidance in soil fertility related research by students in the project.

Josephat Ambuga

AVENE

Josphat Ambuga is the Director of Avene Community Development Organization, a community-based organization based in Vihiga County in western Kenya. Avene operates in Vihiga and surrounding Counties in western Kenya. Currently, he is a student at the University of Eldoret studying Sustainable Agriculture. Avene is collaborating with Multipurpose Legume Project in integration of grain legumes into smallholder farming to improve system productivity. As a community-based organization with elaborate grass-root networks, Avene is involved in up scaling successful legume options and facilitating farmer research network activities among farmer groups in Vihiga County. Josephat has vast experience working with smallholder farmers to address food insecurity, having collaborated with several projects operating in western Kenya to improve smallholder productivity. These include Striga Management and Eradication Project under African Agricultural Technological Foundation (AATF), and N2 Africa, a biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) Project led by CIAT-TSBF. N2 Africa deals with promotion of legume inoculants, grain legume marketing, value addition and women empowerment. Josephat is also involved in various platforms that deals with agricultural technology evaluation in the western Kenya region.